DISSERTATION. THE occasion of the production of this Dissertation, has already been explained in the Diary of the author. It was printed in the month of August of the year 1765, in the Boston Gazette, there divided into four numbers, and without any title whatever. It attracted much attention in Massachusetts and in England, where it was attributed to Jeremy Gridley, then well known as at the head of the bar in the Colony. Thomas Hollis immediately procured it to be reprinted in the London Chronicle, and three years later, in 1768, caused it to be published by Almon, at the end of a small octavo volume, entitled "The True Sentiments of America," with the caption by which it has ever since been known. In this volume, it is ascribed to Mr. Gridley; but Mr. Hollis afterwards endeavored to correct his mistake by writing at the end of his copy these words: "This Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law was written by John Adams, Esq., a young gentleman of the law, who lately removed from the country to Boston. He has a large practice, and will probably be soon at the head of his profession." So great was the admiration it excited in him, that at another time, he made the following memorandum, which is found transcribed by Dr. Andrew Eliot, in his copy of the book, now in the possession of Mr. Everett : 2 "The Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law is one of the very finest productions ever seen from North America. "By a letter from Boston, in New England, signed SUI JURIS, inserted in that valuable newspaper, the London Chronicle, July 19, it should seem the writer of it, happily, yet lives. T. H.” This Dissertation was reprinted in London, though without date of any kind, probably in the year 1782, and in Philadelphia, by Robert Bell, at the end of a tract upon another subject, in 1783. It appears to merit consideration rather as a searching, analytical sketch, than as a complete performance. In the brief compass of a few pages are crowded thoughts sufficient to furnish as much material as is found in some thick quartos. But they are justly denominated by the author, hints for future inquiries, rather than a satisfactory theory. They should be weighed in connection with his remote position, the time of writing, and the general current of thought of even the educated society around him. By this only can the natural energy and expansion of the author's mind be estimated. Nor yet can it be said, that the reflections contained in the production were thrown off hastily and with little consideration. 1 See volume ii. p. 150. 2 Orations and Speeches on Various Occasions, by Edward Everett, vol. i. p. 140, note. There is evidence to show that they were slowly and carefully matured and developed. It has already been mentioned, that the first draught is found incorporated in the writer's Diary for the month of February, 1765. But no publication took place until July and August; the result then discloses the extent of the changes, enlargements, and improvements, which the work had in the interval undergone. As not infrequently happens, however, in this process, one strong passage was lost by it, which at this time must be regarded as the most deserving of any to be remembered. This will be found appended as a note to the place where it belonged. "IGNORANCE and inconsideration are the two great causes of the ruin of mankind." This is an observation of Dr. Tillotson, with relation to the interest of his fellow men in a future and immortal state. But it is of equal truth and importance if applied to the happiness of men in society, on this side the grave. In the earliest ages of the world, absolute monarchy seems to have been the universal form of government. Kings, and a few of their great counsellors and captains, exercised a cruel tyranny over the people, who held a rank in the scale of intelligence, in those days, but little higher than the camels and elephants that carried them and their engines to war. - By what causes it was brought to pass, that the people in the middle ages became more intelligent in general, would not, perhaps, be possible in these days to discover. But the fact is certain; and wherever a general knowledge and sensibility have prevailed among the people, arbitrary government and every kind of oppression have lessened and disappeared in proportion. Man has certainly an exalted soul; and the same principle in human nature, that aspiring, noble principle founded in benevolence, and cherished by knowledge; I mean the love of power, which has been so often the cause of slavery, has, whenever freedom has existed, been the cause of freedom. If it is this principle that has always prompted the princes and nobles of the earth, by every species of fraud and violence to shake off all the limitations of their power, it is the same that has always stimulated the common people to aspire at independency, and to endeavor at confining the power of the great within the limits of equity and reason. The poor people, it is true, have been much less successful than the great. They have seldom found either leisure or oppor tunity to form a union and exert their strength; ignorant as they were of arts and letters, they have seldom been able to frame and support a regular opposition. This, however, has been known by the great to be the temper of mankind; and they have accordingly labored, in all ages, to wrest from the populace, as they are contemptuously called, the knowledge of their rights and wrongs, and the power to assert the former or redress the latter. I say RIGHTS, for such they have, undoubtedly, antecedent to all earthly government, Rights, that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws - Rights, derived from the great Legislator of the universe. Since the promulgation of Christianity, the two greatest systems of tyranny that have sprung from this original, are the canon and the feudal law. The desire of dominion, that great principle by which we have attempted to account for so much good and so much evil, is, when properly restrained, a very useful and noble movement in the human mind. But when such restraints are taken off, it becomes an encroaching, grasping, restless, and ungovernable power. Numberless have been the systems of iniquity contrived by the great for the gratification of this passion in themselves; but in none of them were they ever more successful than in the invention and establishment of the canon and the feudal law. By the former of these, the most refined, sublime, extensive, and astonishing constitution of policy that ever was conceived by the mind of man was framed by the Romish clergy for the aggrandisement of their own order.* All the epithets I have here given to the Romish policy are just, and will be allowed to be so when it is considered, that they even persuaded mankind to believe, faithfully and undoubtingly, that God Almighty had entrusted them with the keys of heaven, whose gates they might open and close at pleasure; with a power of dispensation over all the rules and obligations of morality; with authority to license all sorts of sins and crimes; with a power of deposing princes and absolving subjects from allegiance; with a power of procuring or withholding the rain of heaven and the beams of *Robertson's History of Charles V. ch. v. pp. 54, 141, 315. This work did not appear until the year after the publication of this Dissertation in England. The two references are in the handwriting of Mr. Adams, in the margin of his printed copy. the sun; with the management of earthquakes, pestilence, and famine; nay, with the mysterious, awful, incomprehensible power of creating out of bread and wine the flesh and blood of God himself. All these opinions they were enabled to spread and rivet among the people by reducing their minds to a state of sordid ignorance and staring timidity, and by infusing into them a religious horror of letters and knowledge. Thus was human nature chained fast for ages in a cruel, shameful, and deplorable servitude to him, and his subordinate tyrants, who, it was foretold, would exalt himself above all that was called God, and that was worshipped. In the latter we find another system, similar in many respects to the former;1 which, although it was originally formed, perhaps, for the necessary defence of a barbarous people against the inroads and invasions of her neighboring nations, yet for the same purposes of tyranny, cruelty, and lust, which had dictated the canon law, it was soon adopted by almost all the princes of Europe, and wrought into the constitutions of their government. It was originally a code of laws for a vast army in a perpetual encampment. The general was invested with the sovereign propriety of all the lands within the territory. Of him, as his servants and vassals, the first rank of his great officers held the lands; and in the same manner the other subordinate officers held of them; and all ranks and degrees held their lands by a variety of duties and services, all tending to bind the chains the faster on every order of mankind. In this manner the common people were held together in herds and clans in a state of servile dependence on their lords, bound, even by the tenure of their lands, to follow them, whenever they commanded, to their wars, and in a state of total ignorance of every thing divine and human, excepting the use of arms and the culture of their lands. But another event still more calamitous to human liberty, was a wicked confederacy between the two systems of tyranny above described. It seems to have been even stipulated between them, that the temporal grandees should contribute every thing in their power to maintain the ascendency of the priesthood, and that the spiritual grandees in their turn, should employ their ascendency over the consciences of the people, in impressing on their minds a blind, implicit obedience to civil magistracy. 1 Rob. Hist. ch. v. pp. 178-9, &c. Thus, as long as this confederacy lasted, and the people were held in ignorance, liberty, and with her, knowledge and virtue too, seem to have deserted the earth, and one age of darkness succeeded another, till God in his benign providence raised up the champions who began and conducted the Reformation. From the time of the Reformation to the first settlement of America, knowledge gradually spread in Europe, but especially in England; and in proportion as that increased and spread among the people, ecclesiastical and civil tyranny, which I use as synonymous expressions for the canon and feudal laws, seem to have lost their strength and weight. The people grew more and more sensible of the wrong that was done them by these systems, more and more impatient under it, and determined at all hazards to rid themselves of it; till at last, under the execrable race of the Stuarts, the struggle between the people and the confederacy aforesaid of temporal and spiritual tyranny, became formidable, violent, and bloody. It was this great struggle that peopled America. It was not religion alone, as is commonly supposed; but it was a love of universal liberty, and a hatred, a dread, a horror, of the infernal confederacy before described, that projected, conducted, and accomplished the settlement of America. It was a resolution formed by a sensible people, I mean the Puritans, almost in despair. They had become intelligent in general, and many of them learned. For this fact, I have the testimony of Archbishop King himself, who observed of that people, that they were more intelligent and better read than even the members of the church, whom he censures warmly for that reason. This people had been so vexed and tortured by the powers of those days, for no other crime than their knowledge and their freedom of inquiry and examination, and they had so much reason to despair of deliverance from those miseries on that side the ocean, that they at last resolved to fly to the wilderness for refuge from the temporal and spiritual principalities and powers, and plagues and scourges of their native country. After their arrival here, they began their settlement, and formed their plan, both of ecclesiastical and civil government, in direct opposition to the canon and the feudal systems. The leading men among them, both of the clergy and the laity, were men of sense and learning. To many of them the historians, orators, |